Impression Of Character Research Articles

Path Analysis of Attitudinal, Dispositional, and Situational Predictions in Impression Formation

Interpersonal predictions of 126 male subjects and 159 female subjects were analyzed for inferential development using a path model. Task attraction was the predominant extended inference; character impression served as the intermediary dispositional inference. The paths for this development differed for males and females.

Negative salience in impressions of character: effects of unequal proportions of positive and negative information.

Summary Subjects were presented with varying amounts of favorable and unfavorable information describing behaviors of an unknown person and were asked to rate his character after each type of information and again a week later. Where the amount of positive information was greater than the negative, results indicated that a single negative behavior neutralized five positive behaviors, yielding an impression only insignificantly better than that based on five negative and five positive actions. Final ratings were compared with values predicted by a simple averaging theory. Empirical ratings were significantly lower than theoretical values except for two cases where an averaging theory would also predict negative impressions.

Effects of Trait Guilt on Impressions of Character and Prescriptions of Punishment and Guilt

In order to determine the effect of trait guilt on impression formation, high and low G-trait Ss read a simulated newspaper story of a student caught cheating on an examination. High and low G-trait males and females, presented with either a male or female stimulus person, indicated ratings of credibility and character, prescribed punishment and appropriate guilt for the offense, and estimated the stimulus person's and their own guilt in the cheating situation. Results indicated that high G-trait Ss prescribed significantly less severe punishment for the female stimulus person. There was also a tendency for high G-trait Ss to impute more intense guilt to the stimulus person and to estimate their own guilt for cheating to be greater than low guilt Ss. These findings and other trends were interpreted from a sex-typing and role-expectation perspective.

Negative salience in impression of character: Effects of new information on established relationships

College students were given hypothetical information that was inconsistent with their prior opinions of a liked or disliked acquaintance and asked to imagine its effect on their evaluation of his character. Sixty-four percent of those given incompatible negative information and 39% of those given incompatible positive information rejected this information until specifically instructed to assume its authenticity. Original character ratings subsequently changed more in response to negative information than to positive. Effects of communications tended to diminish within 1 week but remained significant. Less reversion toward original opinions occurred in delayed ratings if the acquaintance’s alleged behavior had personal implications for S.

Negative salience in impressions of character: Sex differences

Ss evaluated an unknown other from two opposing descriptions, one recounting commendable and another reprehensible behaviors. The factorial design varied sex of perceiver, sex of other, order of information, and trial (after each description and a week later). Initially positive ratings revised downward by negative information remained stable: initially negative ratings revised upward regressed significantly again within a week. There were no main effects of sex, but both sexes were rated more leniently by same-sex perceivers. Final ratings of opposite sex showed a significantly greater influence of negative information; ratings of own sex showed only a similar trend.

Negative salience in impressions of character: Effects of extremeness of stimulus information

Ss were given incompatible positive and negative information from which to evaluate the character of a stranger. Narrative descriptions of low, medium, or high valence difference were administered in positive-negative or negative-positive order. Ratings were made after each block of information and again a week later. Final ratings indicated a disproportionate influence of negative information at all valence intensities. Originally negative impressions that had been revised upward by positive information reverted to the negative within a week; originally positive impressions that had been revised downward were not subsequently restored.

The Campanian Villas of C. Marius and the Sullan Confiscations

By the end of the Republic the Bay of Naples had become a preferred setting for the pleasure villas of wealthy Romans, a centre of fashion and of cultivated ease. The villa of C. Marius at Misenum, though not the first of which we hear, is the earliest coastal Campanian estate whose appointments are explicitly described as having been luxurious. In an epistle of Seneca (Ep. 51. 11) Marius is said to have built the villa, and on a height; of the location Seneca says, vaguely, in regione Baiana, for the subject of the epistle is the depravity of Baiae, and the author took pleasure in contrasting the character of the early villas in the area with the moral decadence of the imperial resort; the elder Pliny locates the site of Marius' villa more precisely: in Misenensi. From Plutarch's somewhat fuller account come a first indication of date, a different impression of architectural character, and the names of two subsequent owners of the property. He states that after the Social War, when Sulpicius proposed Marius, others Sulla, for command in the Mithridatic War, the detractors of Marius urged him to look after his failing health and to go to the warm baths at Baiae:

Historical Criticism and the Interpretation of Shakespeare

HERE is no doubt that Shakespeare scholarship has advanced far beyond the Romantic criticism which confused literature 54@ and life. Yet it is possible that future generations will in their turn smile at the naivete of some of our Shakespeare studies, particularly those concerned with the ethics of the plays. In recent decades the definition of Shakespeare's moral attitudes has been viewed as a problem in the history of ideas that can be solved by the accumulation of objective factual evidence. At best such an approach oversimplifies a complex aesthetic problem; at worst it ignores the essential realities of dramatic art. Professor E. E. Stoll suggested some years ago that we cannot intelligently discuss Shakespeare's characters unless we understand how the impression of character is created in poetic drama. I would suggest, in addition, that we cannot accurately interpret Shakespeare's moral intention unless we understand how moral judgments are translated into the artifice of poetic drama and apprehended by an audience. It has been too frequently assumed that the moral interpretation of Shakespeare is the province of the scholarly researcher, who relates the thought and action of a play to the commonplace political, moral, and religious beliefs of the Elizabethan age. But the same assumptions about a dramatist and his cultural milieu which lead scholars to interpret Shakespeare by means of La Primaudaye, Charron, and Coeffeteau should lead us to interpret A Streetcar Named Desire by reference to Norman Vincent Peale, a latter-day ethical psychologist no less influential than his Renaissance counterparts. To be sure, Dr. Peale sheds some light on the tragedy of Blanche Du Bois: she has no mustard seeds, no Attitude of Gratitude; she might possibly have been saved had she been more of a positive thinker. We would not be surprised, moreover, to find striking similarities between Mitch's views on marriage and motherhood and those of Dr. Peale. Still we must insist that Tennessee Williams' view of life is not Dr. Peale's. We must distinguish between popular and intellectual levels of thought when discussing the cultural milieu of any dramatist. And we must recognize the difference between a moral intuition expressed in art and the traditional platitudes of systematized ethics. That scholarly research enriches our understanding of Shakespeare is undeniable; that it affords a unique revelation of the meaning of the plays is debatable. The very nature of Elizabethan dramaturgy-the immediate plunge into dramatic action-demands that the moral apprehension of character be immediate. Motivation may be complex, subterranean, even inscrutable. The psychological depths of a character like Iago may be dark indeed; but we penetrate to